Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for The Spectator.

This week, I'm joined by the author of journalist Oliver Berkman, whose new book is called

4,000 Weeks, Time and How to Use It. Oliver, welcome. Four thousand weeks is what you reckon a

human lifespan to be. Is that so? It's pretty close to the average human lifespan in the West.

If you lived every 80, you'll have a few more than 1,000, than 4,000. And if you live to be 90, you get into the

5,000s. And yes, just about. So anyway, yes, this is a human life. The point is that it's very

short when you express it in weeks, rather than the absolute number, I think. Yeah. I mean,

was this just sort of fact you suddenly lit on and started terrifying your friends with?

I mean, what was the way into this book?

Yeah, I mean, for the title, certainly.

It was a fact I lit on and practically had a panic attack and then started asking other people to tell me off the top of their heads without doing any mental arithmetic,

how long they thought the average human lifespan was in weeks. And yeah, plenty of people sort of

said numbers in five, six figures and were shocked by the truth. I do think, I mean, we can get

into this, but I do think that the sort of reason for this book is something that sort of emerges

from my own history as a sort of so-called productivity geek, you know, obsessed with ways of

reorganising your schedule and your to-do list and your system of forgetting things done.

And there, I think, what's really important is not obviously the length of life because we can't

know what the length of anyone's

life is going to be, but just this fact that we proceed as if it's limitless when it is in fact

very highly limited. But wouldn't realising your time is short? I mean, my first did think would be

to think, realizing your time is short is a thing that would drive you

into panic to make even better use of it. But your book, as I'm saying, you're making a slightly

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